PART 2
“Before you speak with Maya, there is something you need to understand,” Mrs. Ortega told me softly. “Your daughter may be afraid of you.”
That hurt far worse than any allegation my mother had ever made. “Afraid of me?”
Mrs. Ortega opened a folder containing social worker notes from previous years. Maya had mentioned to a counselor that her father got furious whenever money was spent on her.
It was true. Not because she spent money, but because my mother would call me, lie, and spin stories.
I recalled a phone conversation from two years prior. Evelyn had insisted that Maya spent two hundred dollars on video games. I had called Maya in a rage.
“Do you have any idea how hard I work to send that money?!” I had yelled.
“Dad, I didn’t—”
“No excuses!” I had slammed the phone down.
Remembering that moment made me want to tear my own skin off.
We walked into the study hall. When Maya saw me standing by the door, she dropped her pencil. She didn’t run to me. She took a step back — just one step, but it was enough to shatter my heart.
“Dad…” she whispered.
“I’m not here to yell at you, Maya.”
She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry about the computer money.”
“Where is the money, Maya?”
Her hands began to tremble. “I gave it to Grandma.”
I closed my eyes. “All of it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She told me your company was going under and that you needed help to keep from losing everything.”
Nausea surged through my stomach. I knelt down so I was at eye level with her. “Maya, I need you to tell me everything.”
At first, she barely spoke. Then the lies my mother had fed her began pouring out.
My mother had told Maya that I was sick of supporting her. That her mother’s cancer treatment had depleted all my savings. That no woman would ever marry me because no one wanted to raise a motherless teenager. That Maya needed to cost as little as possible so she wouldn’t be a burden.
“She also said you were ashamed of me,” Maya whispered, staring at her worn shoes.
I pulled out my phone and opened my bank records. “Look at the dates, Maya.”
Maya looked at the screen.
One transfer. Then another. Then another. Food. School. Clothes. Birthdays. Christmas. Math tutoring. The laptop.
She began shaking her head. “No…”
“I sent money every single month.”
“No… Grandma said you never sent anything!” She broke down sobbing, clutching her knees. Then she choked out a sentence that stopped my heart: “I wrote to you! I texted you every week!”
“I never received your messages, Maya.”
She pulled an old, cracked phone from her pocket and opened her contacts. She tapped “Dad.”
I looked at the number. The area code and prefix were correct. The last three digits were completely wrong.
It was the exact same false number that had been submitted to the school.
My mother had altered both contacts. She gave Maya a fake number for me, and she gave the school a fake number to reach me. Then she filled five years of silence with poison.
“I thought you stopped replying because you didn’t love me anymore,” my daughter sobbed.
I pulled her into my arms. “I never stopped loving you, Maya. Not for a single second.”
She buried her face in my shoulder. “But you never came home either.”
That part was on me. I couldn’t blame Evelyn for that.
Then Maya began listing the moments I had missed. Her middle school graduation. My mother had told me it wasn’t worth the flight because Maya hadn’t received any honors.
Mrs. Ortega chimed in gently: “She gave the valedictory address for her class.”
Maya mentioned a state math competition. I hadn’t even known she participated.
“She took second place in the state,” Mrs. Ortega added.
I felt like an empty shell. My daughter had excelled. She had worked hard. She had obeyed. She had starved. And I had berated her from hundreds of miles away because I had trusted an adult’s voice over my own daughter’s.
I held her tighter.
“I thought you hated me because I look like Mom,” Maya whispered against my jacket.
I cried harder than I had since the day we buried Sarah.
That evening, I took her to a restaurant. The first thing Maya did was check the prices on the menu. Halfway through her meal, she began wrapping part of her chicken breast in a napkin.
“What are you doing, sweetie?” I asked softly.
She flinched. “It’s for tomorrow.”
“There will be food tomorrow too, Maya. I promise.”
She looked at me as if that idea were too good to be true.
Later that night at the hotel, I asked her if her grandmother had ever laid hands on her.
Maya went dead quiet. “Not much,” she finally answered.
And when she explained what “not much” meant, I knew the stolen money was only the beginning. But before I confronted my mother, I needed to uncover every single thing she had done over those five years.
